


Secret Shared

by HerenorThereNearnorFar



Category: The Lynburn Legacy - Sarah Rees Brennan
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-29
Updated: 2014-05-29
Packaged: 2018-01-27 00:44:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1708724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HerenorThereNearnorFar/pseuds/HerenorThereNearnorFar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trusting people in Sorry-in-the-Vale is near impossible, when you find someone you can trust you keep them close. It's really only natural Ross and Amber fell together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secret Shared

Amber could still remember when Mrs. Phillips had brought her grandchildren over to Amber’s aunt’s house. Aunt Faith had made Amber sit with Ross and Mina in the kitchen while two older women went to the living room and talked. Amber remembered how the three children had all clustered around the closed door and overheard snippets of conversation. “My husband never had much talent… not much more time for me… you have to teach them, I can’t think of anyone else.”

“Surely someone else… the Prescotts?” Aunt Faith had asked, no doubt wringing her hands. It had always struck Amber as odd that such a tough tutor and forceful woman could be so timid around certain people, primarily authority figures from her childhood.

Mrs. Phillips had raised her voice then, out of mild frustration and it was just enough to let the three children hear clearly. “Hugh’s a wreck and Allison isn’t precisely a role model. Surely you’ve heard about Mina’s near slip up, she needs a good teacher and even though Ross hasn’t shown yet I took him to the pools and he saw gold. Your mother and I were always close friends Faith, I trust you. You’re already teaching your niece, surely you can take in my grandchildren as well.”

Aunt Faith sighed. “I suppose…” she said gently and after that the Phillips siblings joined Amber for her Saturday classes.

 

They weren’t really classes, not like in school. The quartet took walks around the woods and practiced concentrating. Sometimes they baked or did chores and once in a blue moon Aunt Faith would teach them the rhyme or motions of a simple spell. The main focus, however, was drilling the two five year olds and their sulky nine year old compatriot on how they should never, ever talk about their sorcery. You couldn’t tell your friends, you couldn’t tell your babysitter, in Ross and Mina’s case they couldn’t even tell their mother. Even with family members who did know, Amber’s parents and uncle and grandfather, the Phillip’s father and grandmother, it wasn’t something you talked about. Magic meant closed doors and whispers. It was a secret and bubbly children are not built to keep secrets. Amber chafed under the restraining rules, longed to show her playground friends what she could do.

Really it was only natural that she would gravitate towards Ross, who was the same as her, who she could talk to about sorcery (so long as there weren’t grownups around to shush them), he was the only person her age she could be honest with and now she was the only person he could confide in as well. The results were predictable.

 

Ross was an athlete, the biggest person in their (admittedly small) year and always running races and playing violent games. Amber liked sports as well, and was good at them besides, but her friends preferred talking and drawing to football so the two of them had never really interacted at school. After a few months of sorcerous Saturdays together that changed and suddenly little Amber Green and Ross Phillips were barely seen away from each other.

They played football, made murals on the pavement in chalk, giggled together at lunch about things no one else understood, and they ran away to the woods during thunderstorms to dance in the rain and delight in the secret that tied them together.

“We should get married when we’re older.” Amber announced one day a few weeks after the elderly Mrs. Phillips died. She didn’t say why and she didn’t need to. They would never have to keep things from each other, never have to hide.

“Alright.” Ross replied

 

The primary school version of romance mostly consisted of holding hands at recess and loudly pronouncing your relationship to everyone who would listen and that suited the two of them just fine. When they were older kissing started getting involved and it was so easy to press close to each other when they knew each other so well.

At the same time that lip locking became (semi) appropriate their Saturday excursions started to peter off. Mina had stopped coming over a few years before so it wasn’t like the cessation of the lessons was a surprise. They could control themselves now and there was no need for them to know how to do anything other than that. The murmurings of Uncle Bobby suggested to Amber that in the old days she and Ross might have gotten more tutelaege but Aunt Faith scolded that what happened in the old days didn’t matter. The children knew enough for this day and age, after all the Lynburns were gone.

 

Three years before the Lynburns came back Mina finished her A-levels and left to go to university, hoping to become a doctor like their mother. Ross watched her leave, looking determined and almost joyous. She’d always hated it in Sorry-in-the-Vale. After the incident and the subsequent revelation of magic she had never been comfortable. Magic unnerved her, made her apprehensive at best and angry at worst. While he and Amber had always loved watching their power shift the world any demonstration of magic just upset her.

When she came back for Christmas she looked drained. Amber’s Uncle Bobby had warned them about the sickness, the emptiness in your veins like you had lost an integral part of your being. He and Faith had urged Mina to choose a college in the countryside, maybe close to Bobby and his boyfriend who would have been happy to help her. Mina had politely refused and went off to London. It had clearly taken its toll. She walked cautiously and when their mother interrogated her about classes she grudgingly admitted that she had missed a lot in the beginning of the year and was behind as a result.

“What’s wrong with her?” Amber asked Ross after a visit to the house. Their relationship meant that they needed no tact.

“I don’t think being in the city is good for her. She seems ill and I found some photos of her earlier this year and it seems it was even worse during… you know, the fall. ” Ross admitted slowly, knowing that Amber’s bad habit of being verbally spiteful when she was upset could creep out soon and mentally steeling himself for a bitter deluge of insults and insinuations. It would be alright though; he would know what she really meant under the cruel words.

Rather than questioning his sister’s judgment like he expected Amber just closed her eyes. “Can I see the pictures?” she asked after a long pause.

Though it was one thing to admit your secrets and another to share your sibling’s Ross obliged and brought up the pages of a few of Mina’s new university friends on his phone, then found the appropriate pictures, silly group shots with Mina lingering like a pale ghost in the background and one blurry photo of her curled up on a couch, looking too exhausted to move.

Amber stiffened next to him “That looks awful.”

All Ross could do was agree with her. “Yeah, yeah it does.”

 

Things were quiet for a while after that. Mina pressed through university though it seemed to be killing her. Amber and Ross had a few fights but eventually negotiated a deal where they could both sleep with whoever they wanted and that eliminated the source of most of their conflict. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, which of course meant that it couldn’t last.

 

After the Lynburns came back the town degenerated into muffled chaos. From the surface it might have seemed normal but Amber’s parent’s quietly questioned her every day after school about the Lynburn boys, three families suddenly moved away, several teachers momentarily froze every time the terrifyingly polite Ash Lynburn raised his hand in school, and people going about their daily activities stopped regularly to worriedly glance at Aurimere. The sleepy village was fitful, as if in the grips of a nightmare.

Yet despite the nervous dispositions of the adults in their lives Ross and Amber didn’t really take things seriously until Nicola Prendergast, who had been Amber’s distant cousin and always invited her to parties because of that, who had worked with Ross last summer at a nearby animal shelter, was murdered. Left dead in the playground that she had played in a decade ago, blood red against the metal of the merry-go-round, killed, most said, by a Lynburn.

Her parents left town quickly after that. Never mind that they had both lived in the Vale their entire lives, the town and it’s bloody traditions had taken their daughter and they were getting out. (That was how Amber’s mother put it in the whispered conversation she’d had with Dad before dinner.) Things got even tenser, something was bubbling under the picturesque surface of the town but for the life of them Ross and Amber couldn’t figure out what it was. Nobody was willing to talk about anything, at least not with them.

Weird things continued to happen though. Apropos of nothing Uncle Bobby came back to town, leaving his boyfriend of three years behind. He and Aunt Faith suddenly weren’t speaking despite usually being on good terms. Other new faces appeared in town, people whose families had moved away from Sorry in the Vale years ago, and some who had no history there. Whispered conversations between Amber’s parents became a daily occurrence and Mr. Phillips was going grayer by the day. Dr. Phillips actually pulled Amber aside one day to ask if she knew what was going on. Amber had smiled and lied with the ease of long practice but it unnerved her that even Ross’s usually oblivious and preoccupied mum was catching on that something was off. Then there was whatever was going on with Kami Glass and the Lynburn boys… things were weird.

It was actually a relief when Uncle Bobby took her out one night and showed her what was going on. Sure, the explanation involved ritual animal sacrifice and the murder of one of her classmates but at least there was one. Besides, the magic in her veins once she stopped crying and just killed the rabbit was incredible and Rob Lynburn made several good points and several even better vague threats. Amber smiled and said that she had to think about it.

 

“So.” Ross said, hugging one of Amber’s pillows to his chest. It was fluffy and purple, concentrating on it was so much easier than concentrating on the horror story she had just told.

“So.” Amber echoed, angry. Ross couldn’t tell if she was angry with herself or with him or with the thrice damned Lynburns. He knew her better than anyone and that directionless, hollow anger scared him.

“What do we do, what do we say?”

Amber shrugged. “What can we say? He has magic, more than us and people on his side. Uncle Bobby…” Her voice broke and Ross hesitantly reached out and squeezed her hand.

“Your Aunt Faith said no.” That was some comfort. That solid Faith had been able to turn the bloody sorcerers down and had survived.

She clung to his hand. “Aunt Faith has more experience and less people to protect. Your mother doesn’t even know, Ross. We need to keep them safe. And what about my father’s side of the family? None of them have magic, what will happen to them if Rob Lynburn wins?”

“You don’t know he will.” It was a prayer as much as a statement. For a second Ross understood how Mina felt, he wished he was born to a normal family, in a normal town.

“He will.” Amber said flatly. “The power, Ross it was like being on fire and not burning. I could have done anything.”

“You make it sound like a good thing.”

Amber scooted closer on the bed and Ross obligingly dropped the pillow. She collapsed, so suddenly it might have frightened someone else, laying her head in his lap and looking up. “It was horrible, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t wonderful as well.”

Ross sighed. “You really think it’s the best choice?”

Amber nodded once, sharply. Her hazel eyes were filled with rage but eventually her face relaxed. “If not for us for our families.” She stretched her arms up, examining hands with carefully painted nails. “It might not be so bad, not having to hide.” With a flick of the wrist her hands were incased in fire that shimmered and danced. Ross didn’t move, knowing how difficult it could be to hold fire and not get burned. After an instant she extinguished the flame. The flower patterns on her fingernails were untouched, and he knew her hands wouldn't even be warm.

“It might.” He admitted grudgingly. “I still don’t like the cost.”

Amber exhaled slowly and twisted her head so all he could see was red hair and the curve of her cheek. “Neither do I.” Her hand clenched. “I hate it Ross.” He didn’t ask what she hated, the town, the family on the hill, their predicament, him. He just shimmied out from under her and lay down, suddenly tired. Slowly, Amber rolled over so they were face to face.

“I love you.” Ross blurted. It was hard not to love the only person you could be honest with.

“I love you too.” Amber replied, as easy as breathing. It didn’t matter how many other people they kissed, the Vale would never stop lying and they had nowhere else to go so they loved each other because it was the best option.

They stayed curled around each other for hours. Then they went to tell Rob Lynburn their answer.


End file.
